Emma Ashmere

‘Please pardon me, but your storyteller is a woman possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink.’ So begins July’s frequently witty and relentlessly shocking account of her life on the Jamaican sugar plantation, Amity. Born into enslavement in the early 1800s, July would once have been ‘put to the lash’ for wielding a pen. Now a justifiably snaky, proud and irreverent old woman, her British-educated son anxiously hovers over her as she writes.

The late author Andrea Levy was born in England to Jamaican parents, and began writing the books she had ‘always wanted to read’ in her mid-thirties. Her fourth novel Small Island won multiple awards. The Long Song also demonstrates remarkable skill, weaving in the terrible, cruel, and relentless realities of slavery with a vibrant and inspiring narrative.

I suspect The Long Song hooks us in because all of the characters are in some way flawed. Everyone must look out for themselves in increasingly tumultuous circumstances, but there is also solidarity.

July is a spirited survivor. Fathered by a drunken Scotchman, she is torn from her enslaved mother for the ‘amusement’ of the new mistress of Amity, Caroline Mortimer. Renamed Marguerite, July becomes Caroline’s maid, tending her pillow, ironing her fiddly petticoats, calming her fears on being trumped by the neighbours and listening to her rants.

Andrea Levy plunges us into the busy kitchens where jealousies rage as ‘turtle served in the shell’, beef, ducks, pork, cheese, vegetable soups and plum puddings are prepared for the ‘fatty-batty’ masters’ Christmas feast. While the guests loll at the table, the plantation musicians fail to deliver ‘civilised music’ , and the those forced to work torturously long hours subsist on paltry rations. A few moments later the musicians produce flawless renditions, having tired of deliberately annoying their masters.

This novel is expertly researched, deftly and tenderly written. Andrea Levy invites us to hear the voices so often silenced. The historical details are rich and redolent. The language is poetic and rhythmic. The plot hums along. The dialogue is sharp. For the contemporary reader, familiarity is finely balanced with foreignness.

‘So come, reader, worry no more upon my son’s rudeness, just follow me close,’ says July. Gladly – but tentatively – I followed her as she forged a passionate and precarious relationship with Caroline’s new God-fearing husband, Robert Goodwin, in a basement room at Amity.

Both witness to and participant in the official ending of slavery. July’s ‘long song’ is an important and illuminating journey of heartache, courage, brutality, ingenuity, oppression, resilience, and the unstinting courageous fight for rights and freedom.

Published in the Northern Rivers Echo 2020

Some of Emma Ashmere’s ancestors were born in the Caribbean and have been researched and written about by Caribbean scholars. As a white Australian, Emma writes about history’s gaps, contradictions and silences, and the richness and limitations of trying to comprehend and imagine past lives via fiction. Her short stories, essays and poetry have been widely published including in The Age, Meanjin, Commonwealth Writers Magazine adda, Island, Cordite, Griffith Review, Overland. Shortlistings include: 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, 2019 Newcastle Short Story Prize, 2018 Overland/NUW Fair Australia Prize and 2001 Age Short Story Award. Her debut novel The Floating Garden was shortlisted for the 2016 Small Press Network MUBA prize. Her short story collection Dreams They Forgot was published May 2020 by Wakefield Press.